The desert at last

Jaipur, Tuesday 5 February 2013

So, I've finally got started with volunteering. I arrived in Jaipur on Sunday, in a shared taxi from Delhi - it was an interesting journey (in a good way) and more about that later.

I'm living with a young family in this desert city - Nitesh, Chitra and their two daughters who are 8 and almost 5, and another volunteer, Gabriella, from Brazil. Nitesh's mum and dad live upstairs.

The neighbourhood around the house I'm staying in, from the rooftop terrace

The front of our house

The family started the charity organisation themselves a few years ago and it's now a registered charity here in India called Shrestha. This is also the name of their youngest daughter, and means special, as in, every child is special. Here's the address for their Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/SHRESTHA/134826579880866

The charity works to improve the life prospects of children living in one particular slum village near here, through education. Nitesh and Chitra try to find sponsors for as many of the children as possible, which means they can attend a private school here, have a uniform, books, etc. For the children who don't have sponsors, they run classes themselves in a schoolroom they rent in a building beside the slum.

Nitesh and Chitra give them Hindi classes, starting late morning, and then we volunteers are let loose with some English classes. Then they play for a while before home time at around 3.30pm.

Yesterday was my first day. The children gathered round the car enthusiastically when we arrived, and could hardly wait for us to open the door to find out what my name was. The ones who came yesterday were various ages, from six or so up to 13. Apparently there's a group of around 25 who generally come.

Story time - not sure how much they understood
about the adventures of Timmy the Sheep, but they
seemed to enjoy it anyway.

As soon as Nitesh opened the school, they bounded in and set about sweeping the floor and arranging the chairs around a whiteboard. They immediately took a brush off Gabriella when she tried to help! That done, it was time to introduce them to me, and then we did some basic conversation with them - from 'How are you' to 'what's your favourite...'. The older ones helped out the younger ones, whispering the answers in their ears. We used picture flashcards then, to build their vocabulary a bit, followed by a story.

For playtime, hula hoops were the name of the game, with some going for Connect 4 with Gabriella. Grace Jones performing Slave to the Rhythm at the Queen's birthday concert while spinning a hula hoop came to mind, and my friend Frederique singing it later after inhaling helium from my 40th birthday balloon! Isn't the mind a wonderful thing.

Hula hooping!

Nitesh gave them some cookies at the end and they immediately tried to share them with Gabriella and me. Those who have the least...

I don't know whether I'll be with this project for one week or two. The local coordinator for the volunteering agency is coming to see me at some point this week, and she's going to tell me about the other projects here in Jaipur that I could potentially visit for my second week.

Ideally, you'd have a volunteer come and spend an academic year here, of course, and take them through a coherent programme of English. Each volunteer who's here for a shorter time must take a while to get to know their language level and figure out what do in the classes, given that most of us aren't teachers. But volunteers coming and going must surely be better than no volunteers at all. At the least, it hopefully gives them a chance to interact with people from different places and know that people are interested in their education.